Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

The truth about ‘Latinx’

16. November 2019 Philosophy News News
In recent years, the term Latinx has become popular in academic settings in English to designate a group of people without reference to gender, which is designated by -o and -a endings in some Romance languages. While academics and Twitter users have begun to use the term, only 2% of the U.S. population actually identifies with this word.  Latinx […] The post The truth about ‘Latinx’ appeared first on [More]
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The Future of Automation? Video Interview about Automation and Utopia

16. November 2019 Philosophy News News
I recently sat down and did a video chat with Adam Ford about my new book Automation and Utopia. I've talked to Adam several times over the years. He runs a great Youtube channel where he interviews pretty much every leading figure in futurism and transhumanism. I highly recommend checking it out.This conversation, unlike some of the others I have done about the book, focuses mainly on the automation of work. Will it happen? What's different about the current wave of automation compared to previous waves? What will be the consequences of widespread automation? We also talk about Nozick's experience machine argument towards the end.If you are interested in the book, you might consider buying a copy or recommending it to a library (etc). If you have already read it, you might consider reviewing it, mentioning it online, or recommending it to friends or colleagues. #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe to the [More]
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Why Materialism is a Dead-End

15. November 2019 Philosophy News News
We live in an age of science, which has enabled technological advancements unimaginable to our ancestors. Unlike philosophy, which depends somewhat on certain subjective values and one’s own sense of plausibility to settle questions, science poses questions directly to nature, in the form of experiments. Nature then answers by displaying certain behaviors, so questions can be settled objectively.This is both science’s strength and its Achilles’ heel: experiments only tell us how nature behaves, not what it essentially is. Many different hypotheses about nature’s essence are consistent with its manifest behaviors. So although such behaviors are informative, they can’t settle questions of being, which philosophers call ‘metaphysics.’ Understanding nature’s essence is fundamentally beyond the scientific method, which leaves us with the—different—methods of philosophy. These, somewhat subjective as they may be, are our only path to figuring out what is going on.Materialism—the view that [More]
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An Interesting Defense

15. November 2019 Philosophy News News
If you ask the Democrats, one reason that Trump should be impeached is that he tried to extort Ukraine to investigate a long-debunked conspiracy about Joe Biden and his son. Put in more general terms, it could be said that one reason the Democrats want to impeach Trump is that he tried to push an [More]
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Power and Technology: A Philosophical and Ethical Analysis

15. November 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.11.08 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Faridun Sattarov, Power and Technology: A Philosophical and Ethical Analysis, Rowman and Littlefield, 2019, 198pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781786611291. Reviewed by Barry Allen, McMaster University The notion of technological power has become an object of attention in both academic and policy circles. Several different concepts of power are in play in these discourses, demonstrating the need for a cross-disciplinary, integrative framework to identify and clarify different ideas about the relation between technology and power. This book aims to provide such a framework for understanding the exercise of power by and through technology, and to do so by bridging social and political theory, critical studies in technology, philosophy, and ethics. These words, paraphrased from Faridun Sattarov's own summary, describe the aspiration of his book. They sound fine. Sadly, the execution consistently disappoints the interest this summary description appropriately provokes. Sattarov advocates a pluralist approach to the concept... Read [More]
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